Timer Efficiency

Question

I am planning to develop a system with tens of thousands of objects in it, which will each have up to 42(but more likely down around 4 or 5) separate actions they will potential

Answer 1

The tradeoff in your three options is between memory and CPU. More timers mean more timer nodes (memory), and aggregating these timers into fewer timers means more CPU, as you check for events that need servicing at run time. The CPU overhead in starting too many timers (and expiring them) is not too great an issue with a decent timer implementation.

SO, in my opinion, if you have a good timer implementation, choose to start as many timers as you need (be as granular as possible). But if any of these timers per object are mutually exclusive, consider reusing a timer node.